"Lost and Found"
Jer. 1:4-10; Ps. 71:1-6; Heb. 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17
Emily Martin
Seminary Intern
September 16, 2007
When I first read the Jeremiah text, I thought, “Yikes. What a downer. Here I am preaching for the first time at Government Street and a beautiful child is being baptized, and Jeremiah’s got God saying ugly things about children and sending a hot wind to bring destruction. In Jeremiah’s vision, the earth is waste and void, and there is no light—just like it was before creation. The mountains and hills are quaking; the earth is as barren as the desert; and all the cities are laid in ruins. Here I am, ready to preach the good news, and Jeremiah is predicting judgment and disaster to rival Noah’s flood because everyone is, once again, either clueless or evil. It seemed overly pessimistic to me. But then I listened to the news.
I heard about the two young fathers cycling on Baldwin County roads, who were killed by a drunk driver, by someone just a few years younger than myself—and who’d hit and killed a cyclist once before. “They are stupid children,” Jeremiah said, “they have no understanding.”
Every day, I hear of fatalities due to suicide bombings in Iraq. And if not in Iraq, then in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or London, or Spain. This week marked six years since the bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11th. “They are skilled in doing evil,” Jeremiah says, and it seems to me, that, yes, they are.
Then Kara told me about her friend serving as a young adult volunteer in the Philippines, how her latest e-mail had described visiting people who’d carved out homes for themselves--in the mountains of garbage at the city’s dump. And then I read about it in Habitat for Humanity’s magazine, which not only talked about the horrific living conditions for the urban poor in the Philippines, but in cities all over the world—in this country, too.
Meanwhile, the temperatures climb; more species go extinct every day; AIDS and other preventable diseases continue to spread. Tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes bring devastation. You know what it looks like when the earth is waste and void, when the cities lie in ruins. After all, it’s only been two years since Katrina.
Is this good news? An earth that is waste and void? If that’s the way the story ends…no, it’s not. That’s not the kind of world I want for Katie. It’s not the kind of world I want for any of us. But I’m pretty sure that it’s not the kind of world God wants either. The very language that Jeremiah uses, language from Genesis 1, reminds us that the world was created good, and that we were created in God’s image.
And yet, in this vision, the desolation seems inevitable. Even if God does not make a full end, the world Jeremiah anticipates if things continue as they are, doesn’t really seem worth living in. And sometimes when I look around me, when I listen to the news, it does seem that we are on a path that leads to destruction. I can’t help but think sometimes that the whole world is lost.
But fortunately for us, God specializes in finding the lost. 4“Which one of you,” says Jesus in Luke, “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?” That makes sense doesn’t it, leave the 99 in search of the one. No, it doesn’t make sense at all. I mean, you wouldn’t leave 99 dollars on the table in the coffee shop to go look for one you may have dropped in the parking lot. It seems to me that any sane person would cut their losses and keep the ninety-nine.
But that, of course, assumes that the sheep are a simple commodity. A matter of numbers and dollars. But what if the sheep is your very own child? Well, that changes things, doesn’t it?
When we baptize Katie today, we are making an important claim about who Katie is, and whose she is. We are proclaiming before all the world that first and foremost Katie is a child of God. She’s not a commodity, even though this culture will try to tell her that she is. That good bodies and minds sell products, are products themselves. That her worth is determined by the color of her skin, by how good she looks, by how much money her mom has, by what grades she makes and where she goes to college.
You will have to teach her differently. Her worth lies in that she was created in the image of God, and that God in Jesus Christ laid down his own life, that she might never be separated from God’s love.
In a violent and impoverished world, where we so often act as if lives are cheap, the parables remind us that in God’s sight, each person, no matter how small, no matter how lost, is valuable and precious. There is no debate or hesitation on the part of the shepherd or the woman—we know how valuable the sheep and the coin are because they are immediately searched for. And the search does not stop until they are found.
But the text talks about having joy over a SINNER that repents, and here we are baptizing a baby. How can we talk about sin when we are baptizing someone not even a year old? We can, and we must because sin is bigger than just you and me and the decisions that we make. It includes those, but it’s more than that. We’re not just talking about one person being lost here, we’re talking about the whole of humanity being lost. The whole world. The consequences of sin are global. Humanity and creation are in this together. Everyone and everything is affected.
When Jeremiah talks about sin, he talks about it in terms of evil, but also in terms of ignorance. It’s not really that infants have done anything bad that requires their repentance, but they are born into a world that is lost, that is steeped in sin. Not that infants are perfect—they are vulnerable, yes, and lovable, certainly, but they can also be pretty selfish. And toddlers can bite and destroy and manipulate with the best of them. Just ask my mom.
But sin is bigger than that. It’s in the way our economy works. It’s in the language that we learn to speak. It’s in the way that our living on the earth has affected the climate and the weather. It’s in who lives where and who works for whom and who can’t find a job at all. If sin is that pervasive, what chance does a nine-month-old baby girl have? What chance do any of us have? Without God, we have no chance at all.
But the good news is that we do have God. And our God is not a god who waits for us to find him. Our God finds us. When we’ve wandered off, when we don’t even know that we’re lost, God finds us. There are no ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Not that I’ve ever met. Remember what Jesus said when they brought him a woman caught in the act of adultery, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And one by one, they went away. We are all in need of repentance. Katie will need you to teach her this too.
In fact, I hope that after today, you will play a big part in Katie’s life, just as you play a big part in this story. There may not be 99 righteous persons who need no repentance, but there are 99 sheep. In Greco-Roman culture, multiples of ten symbolize perfection and completeness. In other words, the flock of 100 sheep is not complete if one is missing. Same thing with the coins. The woman does not merely lose a coin, she loses one of ten coins. And some scholars think they may have been part of a bridal headdress. Neither the sheep nor the coin is meant to be alone. And neither are we. We are meant to be in community.
Every time we baptize someone into the body of Christ, we are also welcoming them into a new family, and into a life of community. From now on, we are members of the same body, so if someone goes missing, we’re in trouble. It’s not only God who searches. If Katie’s ever in trouble, we’d better organize a search party: the shepherds and the women, and the lawyers and the bankers, the retired folks and the youth, and everybody else. Because the eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” From now on, when Katie suffers, we all suffer. When Katie rejoices, we all rejoice.
My mom told me a story about my great grandmother and the lunches she used to prepare every Friday. The whole Saliba family was invited—children, grandchildren, friends, new people in town, especially new people in town. She’d get up while it was still dark outside to start cooking all the traditional Lebanese food she’d serve at noon: Tabbouleh, Kibbeh, stuffed grape leaves. But what my mom remembers most is my great-grandmother’s missing person radar. There could be fifty people in the house, and she would key in on the one that she hadn’t seen yet. “Where’s Annamarie? Has anybody seen Annamarie?” And she would keep shouting and asking until my mom came. Then she’d wrap her arms around her and cover her with kisses, saying “Dennee, Dennee, Dennee,” which means “Dear one,” or so I’ve been taught.
I think God must be like that. He wants us all in the house; he wants us all at the table. If we’re not there with the rest of the family, laughing and loving and carrying on, God starts calling our names. And he doesn’t stop until we are safe in his arms. The meal’s not ready until everyone who is supposed to be there is there, eating and laughing and enjoying one another’s company.
And joy is the note that Luke ends on. That’s the point of all the searching. That’s what it’s all about. When the shepherd finds the sheep, he calls together his friends and neighbors. When the woman finds her missing coin, she calls together her friends and neighbors. And there is joy in heaven.
Today is about making a commitment, it’s about making a commitment to God and to Katie. But it is also a celebration. We celebrate because God has already claimed Katie as a beloved child. We celebrate because God claimed us, too, as children. We celebrate because Jesus Christ died and rose victorious over sin and evil and death. We celebrate because each one of us is a new creation in Christ. And because we have found and been found by one another. And now there is nothing, nothing in all creation, that can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. Amen? Amen.
*Note: Katherine Belan Kaffer’s baptism was rescheduled at the last minute due to her grandmother’s fall that morning. (Sara Kaffer is recovering well from that fall.)
Charge & Blessing:
Go forth into the world,
rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion of the Holy Spirit
be with you all.
Alleluia! Amen.